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On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, in the midst of World War I, fifteen hundred volunteer troops staged a violent uprising in the Irish capital of Dublin and in strategic positions across the then-British colony. In retaliation, the English deployed ground troops and sailed the gunboat Helga up the Liffey River. In the ensuing fighting, Dublin’s main thoroughfare, Sackville Street, was almost utterly destroyed, and over three hundred buildings were damaged in the city, including many major landmarks. Public reaction to the uprising was mixed, but it did, without a doubt, help precipitate the subsequent War of Independence and Irish Civil War, and the establishment of the Irish Free State. Elizabeth Bowen’s best-known Irish novel, The Last September, takes place during the War of Independence and does not mention Easter 1916, yet its repercussions, and the significance of the violent destruction of architecture, pervade this novel and all her subsequent work. This precipitating event of the Easter Rising, while nowhere overtly present in Bowen’s novels, contributes to a powerful connection in her writing between the ongoing urban warfare of the twentieth century and images of threatened or destroyed architecture in Ireland. “Yes, ruins stand for error or failure,” she says in Bowen’s Court, “but in Ireland we take these as part of life.” Bowen’s work suggests that those living through the early decades of the twentieth century in Europe must also take ongoing warfare as “part of life.” This generative anxiety rooted in 1916 and in the subsequent violence in Ireland and across Europe provided for Bowen a long-term anticipation and a set of potential outcomes, real or imagined; these events provide a narrative architecture of suspense that undergirds all her subsequent fiction, especially her novels written between 1929 and 1955. In many cases, this anxiety also directly engages with architecture itself, either through the anticipated destruction of houses and cities, or through the figurative language by which she describes a perceived breakdown in “civilization” in the 1920s and beyond. Perhaps most tellingly, it is the suspense of the non-catastrophe—the anticipated event that never happens—that most urgently permeates Bowen’s writing. Her fiction typifies a pervasive anxiety in all late modernist work, one that reacts to and anticipates the ongoing threat of violence.
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irish literature
WWI
